This invention relates to an electronic trading system (hereinafter, “ETS”) and methods for the electronic trading of fixed income related instruments—e.g., such as the United States Treasuries, United Kingdom Gilts, European Government Bonds, and Emerging Market debts, swaps, repos, etc. The invention may also be used for the electronic trading of securities or other financial instruments, such as stocks or currencies, and is not limited only to the trading of fixed income related instruments. More specifically, this invention relates to implementing a customizable spreadsheet application as the user interface for an electronic trading system.
For many issues of fixed income related instruments, the function of the human broker—i.e., the entity that matches a buyer and a seller of the fixed income related instrument—has been replaced by the ETS. More particularly, the ETS provides a trading system that is accessible by traders of the fixed income related instrument. This trading interface function of the ETS has substantially reduced the cost of trading because it has reduced the manpower required to execute a trade of the fixed income related instrument.
Nevertheless, the automation of the system as available to the trader is limited. For example, in an ETS, the trader must typically manually formulate his own bid to buy or offer to sell the fixed income related instrument and then key the bid or offer into an input device of a computer. This is patterned after the legacy requirement of verbally instructing the human broker to provide bids or offers. The trader is not presently able to construct an automated trading model and have the model trade without human intervention. This severely limits the trader's ability to reap the benefits, such as trading using a pre-tested trading model, that fully electronic trading would provide him.
It would be desirable to provide a customizable spreadsheet application—e.g., Microsoft Excel in which mathematical functions and calculations may be customized or selected by the user—that includes an interface to an ETS, the ETS being used for trading fixed income related instruments, wherein the functionality of the spreadsheet application is accessible to the user as he trades in the ETS.
It would be further desirable to include an application program(ming) interface (hereinafter, “API”) within the a customizable spreadsheet application that allows for efficient communication between a spreadsheet application and an ETS.